“In a way, the Aztec model makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield.”

Yeah, there are a lot of factors, one of which is that cultural, the religious aspect to it. The warfare was rewarded by increase in status. The warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tinochtitland for sacrifice. There was even like a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners, like that four Totonaks were worth one Chichimek because the Chichimek were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totonaks did. To a degree, there's a certain overlap with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them, because then you could ransom them back to their families and you can come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain. In a way, the Aztec model makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield. Even kings, the kings of France after the battles of Poitiers and Pavia were captured and then subject to various indignities. So to a degree, there was a certain level of overlap. But more holistically, you're right. Yes, the Aztecs did fight ideally to capture, not to kill. And there were multiple episodes when they did have Cortez himself under their knives, but were so desperate to haul him off. His compatriots, sometimes sacrificing themselves, were able to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture, in their faith, in the religious expression of the values of an entire people. Difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. I'd be asking people here, if we're fighting aliens from another planet, to give up Christianity because there's too much invested in terms of its morality and more effective combat skills will be derived from following some other faith. It was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited timeframe to do that. The Cuzco situation, we could, to use a famous film example, the movie 300. The Spartans are able to hold the pass of Thomalpalai because against overwhelming numbers, it's very, very narrow. And within Cuzco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances. And the streets of Cuzco are quite narrow as well, which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues. And those could be blocked relatively effectively, even by the small numbers of conquistadors and their increasing numbers of native allies, able to put in place with their metal armor blocking operations that could hold those kind of frameworks. Beyond that, when the pressure came off, then they would unleash their horses, largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside, looking for isolated detachments to take out. And this effect was demoralizing on the Inca. They initially had the advantage. They were rallied by Manco. We're going to deal with these barbarians once and for all. But as the frustration of the siege drags on, there's more and more defections, men slipping away at night, either to switch sides or just go back to their homes and families. Again, this army is huge, very diverse. And many of those recruits are people who've been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest before the winter. The nature of warfare in the pre-Columbian America and Europe for much of its history was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops. You need the men on their farms to do that because if they're not there, then you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year. So for all those reasons, the Inca, yes, with those huge numbers, weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they caught perhaps the entire conquistador army marching through one of those mountain passes, yes, they may have been able to win a set-piece battle in that environment. The horses can't charge up the steep slopes. Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees, mean the infantry is not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down. All the advantages would have been useless at that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a two-ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face. If they've been able to arrange that, on small scales, they were, but to get the entire conquistadors in one place at one time like that, that never happened.